JAN MOIR: Classroom weigh-ins won't help little salad dodgers

Ludicrous: Sarah Wollaston, the Totnes MP and former GP, is calling for children to be weighed at school every year

Roll up, roll up, get on the scales you porky tubs of lard. Jenkins, you horrible little salad‑dodger, put down that triple cheese Big Mac and come over here to get weighed.

We haven’t got all day. Crikey, half a ton! You have been a naughty boy since Easter, haven’t you?

I’m going to have to come around and have a little chat with your mother, show the silly woman the difference between a lettuce and a jumbo KitKat. Round green thing, good; choccy bar, bad — that sort of thing.

Now waddle along and send the rest of the class in. The whole school has got to get on the scales before lunchtime. It’s a new Government edict.

Ludicrous? Not if Sarah Wollaston has her way.

The Totnes MP and former GP, who has recently been elected chairman of the Health Select Committee, is calling for children to be weighed at school every year. She wants to do this to wage war on child obesity, which she describes as an ‘epidemic’ in the UK.

It certainly is a problem that needs addressing, but is this really the way forward? In theory, it sounds good.

Any children who begin to put on weight will be alerted to the problem. Their parents will be duly informed and then healthy meals and calorie-counting will ensue. Applause and slices of Ryvita all round.

I mean, who is kidding whom? Ms Wollaston genuinely believes measuring pupils will help because ‘if you can see children are starting to slip into difficulties then you can let parents know and offer them help if they want it’.

In practice, how could that possibly work? Eager officials despatched to homes to lecture on the evils of deep-fried foods and fizzy drinks?

I can imagine a swift departure from the doorstep, their well-meaning personages enhanced by a litre bottle of Pepsi stuck where the sun don’t shine.

One thing we know is that any form of nanny state approach to public health rarely works.

Parents don’t need a school representative to tell them a child is overweight. They can see the evidence with their own eyes — but choose to do nothing about it. You cannot shame parents into giving children healthier food, it just won’t work that way.

And what happens if it is discovered that more children from deprived backgrounds are obese? Are teachers and health experts going to single them out in school, march around to their homes and make their mums swap crisps for kale?

(Although research shows that middle-class children are also getting fatter, with busy parents feeding them ready meals packed with sugar and fat and allowing them to play on their computers and phones all day, rather than exercise.)

Teachers are not parents, and giving pre-teens a classroom complex about their weight seems to be adding to the problem, not eradicating it. And it seems wrong that children should be preoccupied with what it says on the scales.

Thinspirational heroines: Educating all pupils about nutrition is paramount - for both those who are overweight and those who diet down to sparrow-size, emulating role models like Alexa Chung (left) and Keira Knightley

Schools could do more. Surely putting more sport and exercise into the curriculum would be a lot better than humiliating children.

The Government should spend money bringing back cooking classes and domestic science for boys and girls. Also, healthy — and tempting — school lunches would help, as would the removal of vending machines from school premises.

Educating pupils about nutrition is paramount, and that goes for children at both ends of the weight issue — the overweight ones and the girls who diet down to sparrow-size, willowing away to nothing in emulation of thinspirational heroines such as Alexa Chung and Keira Knightley.

To this end, it is important that food is put in the correct context; that having too much or too little body fat is not about attractiveness, it is about being bad for your health.

It has to be done with care, but it has to be done. Plonking kids on scales and lecturing their parents about low-cal lasagne could misfire horribly.

Thrilled to note that Lakeland have started selling a Boiled Egg Topper.

The £9.99 gadget removes the top of your breakfast egg in one smooth dome, without having to contend with stray bits of shell.

Sounds filthy, but if your mornings are blighted by eggshell-related trauma, then this is the gadget for you.

Blondie's still a bombshell

Cute as a mutton: Debbie Harry looked magnificent at a corporate party to launch new uniforms for Virgin airlines staff

Debbie Harry was 69 this week. Happy birthday, Debbie! Here she is, at a corporate party to launch new uniforms for Virgin airlines staff. Yes, that’s what I thought, too. Very spirit of punk rock, not.

At the event, Debbie was dressed in a style known in fashion circles as ‘wildly inappropriate’. She wore a scarlet Virgin jacket.

A sequinned Tinker Bell of a dress, with a daringly sky-high hemline. There were also fishnet stockings. Repeat, fishnets.

She looked like Minnie Mouse’s grandma. She looked as cute as a mutton. But she looked completely and utterly . . . magnificent.

Apparently those who use Facebook are 30 per cent more likely to divorce.

However, what is really annoying about Facebook is the non-apology the company has just issued on its sneaky mood manipulation study that nobody knew about.

In 2012, Facebook deliberately fed good and bad news items into the news streams of 700,000 unwitting users.

They monitored their feeds afterwards to see if the news had an effect on their moods. Which it did.

Users are furious to have been manipulated in this way but Facebook second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg says tough, it’s just what companies do.

God, I do loathe them.

A smile worth paying for

Still smiling: Alex Kerr

Alex Kerr lost six of her front teeth in a near fatal bike accident. She also suffered a broken pelvis, broken jaw, two dislocated knees and a broken wrist.

All of them expertly patched up by the NHS.

Yet at the end of her treatment, the NHS refused to fund an operation to replace her teeth because it was ‘not acute care’.

She would be put on a waiting list, they told her.

Alex, pictured before her dental op, said: ‘I read in magazines all the time about people who have boob jobs, nose jobs and other cosmetic surgery on the NHS because their confidence needed boosting.

I had been in an accident and you would think it would be a priority for them to help me.’

I agree. How can the likes of Josie Cunningham be indulged with free yo-yoing breast augmentations and reductions, when a 20-year-old with no teeth — through no fault of her own — cannot be accommodated?

It is hard to think of anything more crushing to a young woman’s confidence. A problem that was pretty acute — to her.

In the end, a local private dentist did the work for free. A Dr de Jeger, of the Brooklands practice, in Broughton, Bucks, fixed her up with a new smile.

Of course, it has been excellent publicity for him, but still . . . well done, sir.

In her latest bid for international stardom, socialite and canapés maker Pippa Middleton has given an interview to American TV. ‘I have felt publicly bullied a little bit,’ she told NBC. ‘It is quite difficult.

Because I’m just paving my way and trying to live a life like any 30-year-old.’

Like any 30-year old with no job who is trying to cash in on her famous sister, she must mean. No one would be interested in Pippa were she not the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge.

No one would care a jot about her if she led a discreet life doing good works. Instead, she tries to cash in on Kate’s royal connections at every golden opportunity.

If you stick your head above the parapet so frequently, the least you can expect is the odd cannonball.

Speaking of which, Pippa is now reportedly in talks with NBC to be a ‘roving reporter’. If she is as good at broadcasting as she is at catering, we’re in for a feast!

PS: Another week, another party for Beatrice and Eugenie — and I don’t mean the ones at Wimbledon. Don’t the dreary royal sisters have jobs to go to, things to do? Don’t answer.

How will Cheryl cope if she ever has a REAL problem?

Cheryl Cole says she had a breakdown after being sacked from The X Factor in America.

Wake up at the back! I said, Cheryl Cole had a breakdown after she got booted off the American show.

Oh deary me, pass the Kleenex and get ready to be appalled at her ordeal.

In an interview in Elle magazine, Cheryl revealed that she ‘wasn’t well in the head’, that she ‘completely lost myself’, went ‘through hell’, that the sacking ‘literally drove me mad’ and that she ‘became desensitised’. You’d think she’d been tortured and held hostage in a cave by Al Qaeda, instead of being fired as a talent show judge.

I seem to recall she was so traumatised, she had a giant rose tattooed on her bum and released a single called Screw You with a rapper called Wretch. She then sued The X Factor for millions — and won.

Breakdown? I don’t wish anything bad on Cheryl the peril, but I do wonder how she will cope if life ever throws a real problem her way.

Teamwork: Nicola Morland and Angela Illingworth dumped their boyfriend who two-timed them

Nicola Morland and Angela Illingworth got their own back on the man who two-timed them.

The women (pictured) hung a huge poster on a bridge over the A1 outside Newcastle. It read: ‘Steve Frazer — You’re Dumped. By Both Of Your Girlfriends.’

The poor sap saw it — along with thousands of other drivers — on his morning commute into work.

Good teamwork, girls! I hope you both feel a bit better about the world after that. In matters of the heart, it is important never to underestimate the childish satisfaction of having the last word.

WHAT MADE ANDY MURRAY MAD?

What caused Andy Murray to lose at Wimbledon this week? ‘Five f****** minutes before the match!’ he kept shouting, making some believe that girlfriend Kim Sears told him something just before he went on court that caused his spectacular loss of form.